A profile of longtime political consultant Hal Machow in Politico Magazine is notable on two fronts. First, Malchow has written a book in which he advocates for a fundamental change in political advertising. But it's the second reason that may cause double-takes: Malchow, who is in his early 70s, knows he will die on Thursday. As the story explains, Malchow has Alzheimer's, and when it began getting aggressively worse last year, he started working with an assisted-suicide group in Switzerland on arrangements to end his life. That time comes this week. If the decision sounds rash, know that Machow has been thinking it out for decades—he watched his mother succumb to early Alzheimer's when he was in his 30s, and he has been preparing for this ever since.
"I knew that if it happened, I was not going to let all this play out to the end," he says. On the political front, the profile traces Malchow's career working on behalf of Democrats, describing him as a "pioneer" in the field of direct mail advertising. In his book Reinventing Political Advertising, Malchow argues that modern campaigns should make a big shift, one that acknowledges that today's politics have become incredibly polarized. Instead of fighting the trend, he says, it's time embrace it by largely ditching ads for specific candidates and focusing instead on their parties.
"Ninety percent of voters are choosing parties," he writes. "Yet our approach to advertising has not changed at all. Almost 100 percent of our advertising dollars are spent on candidate choice. The decision driving 9 out of 10 votes is not being addressed at all." (Read the full profile.)
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